I wanted to tell you something
- - -I wanted to tell you something in order toexplain the way I feel about the Universe,its workings, etc. But I couldn’t yesterday—I’m sorry—I wanted only to ballmyself up and cry all day. It was the sixteenthday in a row this happened to me, and to be
-more than two weeks waiting to cry is,especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universekept telling you to quit having such a balland that you should have died, like, yesterday.
-At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterdayyou really were meant to die, but since you still are,you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,“No, I meant you should’ve crawled intoa hole and fucking died!" And then the Universepunches you right in the gut, something like sixteen
-times, and all you can think is, “Some sixteenthbirthday! Maybe I will go die in a hole." Yesterday,at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universerefuses to give you. This is when it’s a pain just to be,when that Marvell line about “rolling our stuff into one ball”just seems glib, when you don’t want one body, let alone two.
-Something else that may come as a surprise toyou: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteendays, I’ve had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.(That’s not entirely true—yesterdayI had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.)Maybe this is why I’m so mad at the Universe—
-because all it has ever wanted, this Universethat gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two,and even before that, made a place in which I could be—all it’s wanted was for me to take the sixteensteps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterdayand step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,
-but the problem is, dear Universe, there’s no way I could besomething as hard as all that, to wake up yesterdaymorning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.
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